By John Pickard, Brentwood and Ongar Labour Party, personal capacity
All the hype and publicity in advance of Phillip Hammond’s budget was about an ‘end to austerity’ and how much money the Chancellor of the Exchequer was going to ‘give away’. In practice, his budget signals that the Tory austerity of the last eight years is just going to grind on. The record of successive Tory governments speaks for itself.
Wages have gone through a period of stagnation not seen for two centuries. Millions of welfare claimants are not the unemployed or pensioners, although that is bad enough, but workers paid a pittance and unable to manage a decent standard of living on what they get. There are 14 million in poverty in what is still today one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Out of the ten poorest regions in northern Europe, six are in Britain. Household debt is ballooning as families try to get around the stagnation in their incomes – with a staggering increase in debt of £900 per household in the last year. The freezing of fuel and alcohol duties doesn’t add a single penny to a workers’ pay – it merely relieves them of a cut that they were scheduled to have in their living standards.
The policy of Universal Credit is a disgrace to any civilised country, actively seeking to pauperise that part of the working class already at the bottom end of the ladder. Even the Tory minister responsible for this iniquitous policy, Esther McVey, admits than many families will be £200 a month worse off as a result of its roll-out. It is largely as a result of low pay and the swingeing cuts to welfare benefits that there are so many families – even working families – falling into rent arrears and facing evictions. Not surprisingly, rough-sleeping has more than doubled in the period of Tory rule. More than 120,000 children are living in temporary accommodation, something that costs the taxpayer billions. More money going to private hotels and landlords.
Given the impoverishment of so many families, even former Tory ministers were growing alarmed at the effects of Universal Credit. But Phillip Hammond’s modest softening of the policy and the tiny increase in the so-called ‘living wage’ will barely made a dent to the gathering insecurity and uncertainty for those at the bottom of the pile. Hammond banged on in his budget speech about ‘making work pay’ but the continuation of so many workers on the most precarious jobs, often with zero-hours contracts, is a living refutation of that idea. For millions of workers, work does not pay.
Local government decimated over eight years
The miserable ‘give-aways’ on taxation will go nowhere near to compensating for the cuts in living standards over the last eight years. Any gains for the low-paid are extremely modest; it is a much better tax-cut for the better paid and it is a windfall for the wealthy. Another Tory con, in other words.
Cuts in local government have decimated jobs and services for local communities. Tens of billions have been cut from local authority spending in the last eight years and local authorities still face a funding gap of nearly £6bn by 2020. More than 500 libraries and children’s centres are still set to close. Despite the hype about ‘austerity being over’ in fact there are still £7bn more of cuts to come through the system. No change to these plans have been announced.
There has never been a more difficult period in modern times for young people to buy or let their own homes, but there is no relief for what is in effect a housing emergency. The completely unregulated private renting sector has an increasing number of houses and flats unfit for human habitation and the astronomical rents are heavily subsidised through housing benefit. As long as the provision of a roof over the head is based on the so-called free-market, then we will never get the provision of enough decent houses to match the needs of the population.
The budget has offered no relief for the crisis faced by education. The alleged £400m ‘extra’ for schools is financial sleight of hand – it is not more money, but only a slight reduction in the cuts already going through the pipeline. Practically every state school in the country is facing cuts to its teaching and support staff in the next few years. Schools are unable to buy books and parents are being asked more and more to buy the ordinary day-to-day needs of the classroom. University and college lecturers are being put on zero-hours contracts. There was nothing in the budget to help lecturers and teachers – and all public sector workers – who have suffered a fifteen per cent cut in their living standards since 2010.
River of money flowing out of the NHS
The Tories are crowing about a modest increase in spending on the NHS, but the small increase is not even enough, according to NHS managers, to cover the debts already accrued by NHS trusts. Given the Tories efforts to accelerate privatisation, the river of money flowing from the NHS into private hands will not be stemmed. The current shortages of doctors and nurses will not be dealt with. Waiting lists for treatment are likely to be increase and the decay and disintegration of the service will continue apace.
The great Hammond give-away has provided no hardship fund for the many families of the Windrush generation treated appallingly as part of the ‘hostile environment’ policy. There is no emergency relief fund for the families made homeless as a result of the Grenfell fire.
Meanwhile, the Tories have made sure that there have been permanent tax cuts to the rich and to their friends in business. As John McDonnell writes in the Financial Times today, they are on track “to rack up £110bn of corporation tax give-aways by the end of this parliament.” David Cameron infamously commented that “we are all in this together” but for the last eight years that has never been the case. Since 2010 we have had government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.
“Austerity is coming to an end,” Hammond announced, “but discipline will remain”. We know what that means. The trifling changes to Universal Credit and taxation are no more than cosmetic measures, no doubt destined to be headlined in the Tory press. Meanwhile, there has never been austerity for the rich and that is not something that is going change. The Tories’ spending proposals for the next few years means, not an end to austerity, but austerity built in to the fabric of government for the foreseeable future. The ‘discipline’ of the Tories is entirely wholly towards workers’ living standards and the public services. This budget means, as Jeremy Corbyn said in the House of Commons, that austerity grinds on.
It is time for the Tories to go! Labour must redouble its efforts, not just in Parliament, but in the streets, communities and in the workplaces among its affiliated trade union members, to get the Tories out. The Brexit disaster facing the Tories is only the tip of a much more serious iceberg – the growing insecurity and uncertainty for the big big majority of the population and the ongoing cuts in the standards of their daily lives: in health, education, welfare, pensions, housing and jobs.
Dispossess ‘the few’ to benefit ‘the many’
The working class will get nothing from this government or the capitalist system it is propping up. Labour must go all out to campaign with bold socialist policies. It is no longer enough to campaign for a ‘national investment bank’ or for worker-representatives on the boards of big companies. Big business would fight tooth and nail against these measures, anyway.
Labour must fight for the public ownership of the banks and big industries that dominate the economy and investment. These big companies are owned by a tiny, vanishingly small proportion of the population but they sit astride a stagnant and failing economy like a parasitic kleptocracy. Socialist policies are the only basis on which it would be possible to organise a democratic, national plan of production to meet the needs of the many in relation to jobs, homes, education and health. Labour should have no interest in the wailing and complaints of the ‘few’ – or their political representatives in Westminster. The only way that the wealth, skills and resources of the country can be used to benefit ‘the many’ is by the implementation of a socialist alternative.
October 29, 2018
